Europe won’t save you: Why e-mail is probably safer in the US

Everyone seems to talk about Germany and then extrapolate to the remaining 49 countries.

Because Germany is a huge hub of telecommunications and datacenters. They also happen to be one of the most successful in terms of data, size, price and services. So its fair to take Germany or the UK as examples when someone is trying to compare it to the US in terms of hosted services.

Allot of European services happen to be hosted in Germany. Also, you happen to forget something. The rest of those 49 countries pretty much just follow what Germany do as they are considered the head of the EU now and so other countries try to have similar laws and implement the similar systems, it should not surprise someone that the rest of these countries copy both the good and wrong. I cannot even remember now but I think the EU wanted a single law book across the EU, the European constitution, in that case not even laws but consumer protection and anything else would pretty much similar amongst all members.

Everyone seems to talk about Germany and then extrapolate to the remaining 49 countries.

Because Germany is a huge hub of telecommunications and datacenters. They also happen to be one of the most successful in terms of data, size, price and services. So its fair to take Germany or the UK as examples when someone is trying to compare it to the US in terms of hosted services.

Even more than that, Germany is a big bankroller of other countries. The left hand of policy knows what the right hand of financing is doing. The German government will promote German business in other countries (same as the US, UK, and every other big dog), and bankrolled countries can either face adoption of German-favoring policy, or pressure that will adversely affect their economic prospects.

So yes, when people talk about Germany, France, UK, US, Russia, Israel, China, etc, they can extrapolate to the countries in their influence.

Other countries may spy as much but I've never seen any free-world government as contemptuous of its people as that of the US. I lived in another country for half of my life before moving to the US. There is an undercurrent of evil here where those in power consider everybody else, even those they represent, as the enemy. I've never experienced it in any other country. I am truly fearful for my well-being living here as a result.

Your anecdotal evidence is less than compelling. As noted in the article, the situation may be more public here precisely because other countries could be stifling the data more thoroughly. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

As has been pointed out in other posts here, the US is by no means alone, and there's no country where "they do it right". Every government is manipulatable, and "not doing it now" says nothing about tomorrow.

So where else do they have a private prison system that's allowed to write legislation, enslave prisoners and demands states sign contracts agreeing to provide them with a minimum number of warm bodies?

So where else do they have a private prison system that's allowed to write legislation, enslave prisoners and demands states sign contracts agreeing to provide them with a minimum number of warm bodies?

No. Even the FISC in the US needs to be anchored in a law (in its case it's the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as far as I'm aware, plus various amendments and related laws).

In the US, the legal framework has been created to scrap even the already modest privacy protections that had existed there. And both the US constitution and its legal system apparently permit that.

The post-war german constitution specifically reflects the experiences with the preceding authoritarian regime and restricts the state's latitude in this regard. And the constitutional court also works verty differently here, within a very different legal system.

FISC as it exists in the US could not be made legal here – the Bundesverfassungsgericht wouldn't even have a choice but to scrap it. Even its formal construction would probably not survive a constitutional check already.

You can't actually do everything equally everywhere – well, you possibly could, but it would be legal only in certain countries and illegal in others.

Last I heard an MX record has to have a static IP address. Is that the case or can you use a dynamic DNS service? I'm close to pulling the trigger on converting one of my old PCs to a server and hosting my own mail would prevent a lot of the Google privacy abuse.

I think dynamic DNS would be okay, but you can’t run a server because major ISPs block port 25. E.g., Comcast. To get around this, you have to find an ISP that doesn’t block it (and some of those still have a policy against running servers on your home network); or pay more for business-grade Internet service, in which case you’ll have a static IP anyway.

It would be more cost effective to use a virtual server like Linode or Digital Ocean, which comes with a static IP.

Last time I checked Mein Kampf is also illegal in Germany, the same book that is actually used and for history lessons in Universities in Israel but in Germany books happen to be illegal as as well.

Sorry, that's crap. The copyright holder, the state of Bavaria, keeps any copies from being made.It's quite certainly on the list of items banned from advertising with in any way and selling to minors, but that is a far step from illegal. You can own the book, you can buy the book, you can sell the book, you can read the book. Nothing of that is against the law.

Granted, the mention-Hitler-and-you're-a-nazi thing is indeed big in Germany and sometimes just outright crazy. (There was a recent case where some pranksters took the cover of a satire magazine, which showed a photograph of Hitler with the headline "have you seen this man?" in a wanted poster style, and taped copies without the header of the magazine on the outside windows of some shops. Of course there were investigations because of incitement of the masses, which is crap.)

So yeah, think of Germany how you wish to do and be told I probably don't think any better about it, but it would be nice move to keep the facts straight.

It's time to teach the kids about good information hygiene. The NSA isn't breaking good crypto. They're doing what good spooks do, attacking at the weak point. Most people don't understand how much noise they make, information-wise.

I thought long and hard about Facebook, a service that requires fairly strong authentication, and for what? I need strong authentication to get a mortgage, not to join an advertising campaign.

Single-identity systems are bad juju, but good old Uncle Sam wants us to think it's the way to go. Never mind that the whole social security number mess came from the same logic.

We should establish the minimum identity for the situation, and don't provide free fodder for databases. Meanwhile, the sheep will attract the wolves.

You can't actually do everything equally everywhere – well, you possibly could, but it would be legal only in certain countries and illegal in others.

Which is why the BND outsources its intel collection on German citizens to the NSA?

If those claims should turn out to be true, that would be a prime example of the kind of illegal transgressions I was talking about.

I actually wouldn't be surprised about that in the least – there would just be no way to keep that up once it was clear beyond denial.

And there simply isn't any legal way in Germany to coerce a communication provider into permitting mass surveillance against their objection. If, on the other hand, the provider should assent to such a request, that would make it complicit in an illegal act, and that legal defect would not be salvageable within the constitution. It wouldn't be possible to make a law legalizing this.

That is the difference – in the US the FISC can simply order the provider to comply and to keep everything under the rug, and even threaten the provider's leadership with personal consequences in case of noncompliance.

And it's all legal and covered by the US Supreme Court, since the USSC is complicit in the FISC from the start:The USSC chief justice himself and alone has installed each of the FISC judges by personal appointment, so the USSC is rendered inherently unable to provide any oversight or recourse due to an inherently built-in conflict of interest.

The whole thing is a kafkaesque nightmare of undemocratic abuse of power, tainting the Congress which installed it, the Supreme Court which made itself complicit in creating it and letting it run wild and the government which (ab)uses it as a tool for effectively unrestrained transgressions.

So whether my mail provider is subject to FISC or not does make some difference after all, even if that difference may not be a practical one (because the NSA and CIA don't care about legality abroad anyway), but at least a legal one.

The bizarre idea from the article that mail privacy had primarily to do with evading specific, targeted prosecution on the basis of specific court orders is nonsensical – criminal prosecution has always been possible and should probably remain so, if as the legal framework is in order (which is a significant "if", of course!).

The problem is that US legislative, judicative and executive have colluded in legalizing the NSA's wholesale mass surveillance and its secret coercion of corporations, forcing those to violate their standing legal contracts with their respective customers, thus violating the rights of those customers in turn – both domestically in the US and abroad.

This is not the only bad thing going on in the whole world by far, but given what we've learned so far it's a pretty big deal since it effectively erases all trust in the USA as a halfway safe and reliable guardian of essential information infrastructure.

It's time to teach the kids about good information hygiene. The NSA isn't breaking good crypto. They're doing what good spooks do, attacking at the weak point. Most people don't understand how much noise they make, information-wise.

It just gets more than fishy when they:

• Deliberately compromise good crypto in order to gain access to everything themselves, exposing its users to criminals and other attackers in the process as well.

It's time to teach the kids about good information hygiene. The NSA isn't breaking good crypto. They're doing what good spooks do, attacking at the weak point. Most people don't understand how much noise they make, information-wise.

It just gets more than fishy when they:

• Deliberately compromise good crypto in order to gain access to everything themselves, exposing its users to criminals and other attackers in the process as well.

If you're serious about all that, get a business-grade connection with a fixed IP address from your provider and run your own email server at home. It's not that hard to do and while it isn't going to make your email more secure it surely will get you more privacy especially for communications with others using the very same server. Do the same for contacts and calendar syncing and you'll be free from most of the mass surveillance that is happening as a matter of course now.

If you're serious about all that, get a business-grade connection with a fixed IP address from your provider and run your own email server at home. It's not that hard to do and while it isn't going to make your email more secure it surely will get you more privacy especially for communications with others using the very same server. Do the same for contacts and calendar syncing and you'll be free from most of the mass surveillance that is happening as a matter of course now.

That is, until they raid your home and seize all your computers indefinitely. Which they don't have to try very hard in order to do, even legally.

The safest setting is when you and your email provider are in the same jurisdiction. Every time when this is not the case, your communication is subject to foreign intelligence. I think, at this point of history, it should be clear that when information crosses borders, there is little or no protection for privacy; the agencies simply just don't need justification or permission for reading your communication, if you're a foreigner.

When the provider and the user are in the same jurisdiction, domestic intelligence agencies can't (terms and conditions apply) legally touch your data. Only the police can; and even they must get a permission from what ever the said jurisdiction demands. (In my location, the threshold for police to get a warrant for my data is high and is public; even if it's only after the fact.)

That said, I run my own email server, so if they want my data, they have to come to me and ask for it.

In short, plus extras:

* By default, email is not safe from law enforcement. No matter where you are.* Less intrusion from intelligence agencies, if you're in the same jurisdiction as the provider: Germans: Please, use German providers. Americans: Please, use American providers (a provider that has better terms than Google, mind)* Run your own servers and encrypt. (It's fun and you learn a tonne of things: mainly patience)* Prioritise your privacy needs: your shopping list needs less privacy than your plan to take over the world

1. Who you are makes a difference. The USA regards that human rights only apply to US persons (US citizens and US residents).

So a US-based email service operating under US law denies the rest of us any human rights protection.

2. Who are you worried about?

What are the chances that the German police will want to spy on an ordinary law abiding person not in Germany?

Whereas the USA has global ambitions of spying on everyone everywhere.

Not true. The US will spy on you if you happen to have a desire to build bombs and be linked to terrorists. Germany will spy on you if you happen to type "Hitler" in Youtube. They will not even go as far as ban videos, some which are history videos but they will also track and flag German users looking certain websites online, this is not even a secret and you can find references in Wikipedia about Internet censorship, but what most users don´t know if the huge spying systems on ISP and providers in Europe.

The same is true if you look "Scientology" related data and this are just 2 examples.

So how exactly do you think this is better? One is spying over political reasons, they are afraid or right extremism, even just people doing research on the Internet or looking history facts. The second is for religious motives because even if you think Scientology believers are nuts anyone is free to believe what they want.

Your comment is ridiculous because in Germany police will even send people to jail that happen to have a WW2 ring-tone on their cellphone, (look up in Google)

Its funny how Germans always say they are the most democratic and free country and when you confront them with this real facts, they say, ok but its only those specific subjects as they where some kind of excuse.

You see the difference? In the US and even in the rest of most countries, people are free to believe and speak what they want or think if they are not harming anyone. Ideas are free, if they are communist, or nazis, or muslims, or jews, or happen to think the government is evil or believe in aliens. They are all free to do so.

I just pointed some real facts that you cannot possible deny because they happen to be true and German ISPs will not only go as far as ban some of those contents because they think they are wrong for their internet users but even go as far as report them to the police. Yes that is right. If Cyrus Farivar happens to be in Germany as a reporter making a research on ww2, and happens to be looking videos in Youtube or typing on on his laptop in the hotel, all kind of red flags will start in place and censor content but if he insists enough they will even think he is a possible danger to their government and actually send the police to his hotel room.

Last time I checked Mein Kampf is also illegal in Germany, the same book that is actually used and for history lessons in Universities in Israel but in Germany books happen to be illegal as as well.

There is absolutely no way a free individual can happen to justify any type of content banning or ideas, because people are supposed to be free to believe what they want. Ideas by their own do not harm people, its people that act on violence of those ideas that do. If a government happens to think some ideas are wrong right in advance they are not far from Minority Report where they actually think they can predict the future and your actions. They actually decide what is good or bad for you think.

In the past books where burned and people send to execution for allot of reasons, all of them based on believes. Today they make them illegal or send people to jail, again based on ideas.

This is where the US is so different vs Europe which is almost a police state today.

Have you ever been to Europe? I suggest you travel to the UK, then to Russia and finally to southern Italy and tell me if you still like to make blanket statements.

Germany will spy on you if you happen to type "Hitler" in Youtube.[...]The same is true if you look "Scientology" related data and this are just 2 examples.

Source? I couldn't find anything to back up that claim. Wikipedia, which you mentioned, doesn't seem to have anything on it, as as far as I can tell. Also, I've yet to come across a blocked historical video. German law explicitly allows public display of Nazi symbols in the context of artworks (e.g. movies) or for scholarly reasons (e.g. Wikipedia or school textbooks).

Footage of Nazi rallies and similar material is freely available on YouTube, the same goes for Hitler's speeches and all that kind of stuff. German laws do make it illegal to publicly deny the reality of the holocaust, and videos where people are doing that will probably get blocked, but they don't prevent you from learning and researching the facts.

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Your comment is ridiculous because in Germany police will even send people to jail that happen to have a WW2 ring-tone on their cellphone, (look up in Google)

How does this have anything to do with Internet surveillance? The guy in question had a Hitler speech as a ring-tone on his phone (I don't think he "happened to have it" on there, there was probably a conscious decision involved), someone overheard it and called the police. You might disagree with the law that makes this illegal, or with the police getting involved, but this whole affair played out without any secret court orders, wiretaps or anything like that.

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In the US and even in the rest of most countries, people are free to believe and speak what they want or think if they are not harming anyone. Ideas are free, if they are communist, or nazis, or muslims, or jews, or happen to think the government is evil or believe in aliens. They are all free to do so.

You cannot get arrested for thought-crimes in Germany, either. Holding nazi, communist, or radical islamist views is not illegal. True: Being an outspoken extremist of any kind will probably get you on the government's radar, but this goes for the US, as well. There's no advantage for either side there.

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If Cyrus Farivar happens to be in Germany as a reporter making a research on ww2, and happens to be looking videos in Youtube or typing on on his laptop in the hotel, all kind of red flags will start in place and censor content but if he insists enough they will even think he is a possible danger to their government and actually send the police to his hotel room.

Do you have any sources for that claim? Without evidence it's just FUD. I've never heard of anyone getting arrested for doing research on the Nazis or WW2, or generally just reading and watching that kind of material.I'll say it again: Publicly displaying certain symbols can be illegal, depending on the context. Searching for, or looking at them is not, and can't be grounds for an arrest.

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Last time I checked Mein Kampf is also illegal in Germany, the same book that is actually used and for history lessons in Universities in Israel but in Germany books happen to be illegal as as well.

Flat out wrong. The state of Bavaria holds the German copyright on the book and uses that to keep the book off the national market. It is being used in universities, though, you can legally own it or import it from other countries (where the Bavarian copyright claim does not apply for complicated legal reasons) and, from 2016 on, it will be legal to print and sell it in Germany, as well, since the copyright will have expired.

Feel free to disagree with the state of German law, but do get your facts straight, please.

This article is flawed in that it seems to operate on the assumption that XKeyscore and Tempora never happened. No matter what e-mail provider you use the broken SMTP-protocol will still leak metadata about your correspondents all over the place and this will be registered and stored by XKeyscore and Tempora at the 'border crossings'.

The only way to stay safe is to use BitMessage (end-to-end encrypted P2P-based asynchronous messaging) or similar for what used to be transmitted via e-mail.

The headline is fairly misleading. Despite the apparent beliefs of a lot of commenters, Germany is not Europe. We have several other countries over here, each with their own laws. This article talks exclusively about the laws in Germany, under a headline dismissing all European email providers.

I have no idea which, if any, European countries fare better, but under this headline, that is what I would expect to learn.

So Europe is worse for having a gag order if some specific individual is under criminal investigation, but US is better when everybody's emails can be read secretly, indefinitely? Odd conclusion, especially as even if there is a gag order to email provider, the police will have to inform the suspect of the email search after a set time period. Even if there is no court case.

And this whole piece misses the crucial bit, third party doctrine.There is no third party doctrine in EU. Meta data is secret by law never mind to whom it is disclosed.

"Why the Titanic is probably safer than other ships" would be an interesting in-depth report and the conclusion of the headline would be entirely justified, based on the construction plans and structural weaknesses of other ships.

However, once the Titanic sunk, it would be a less convincing read. And that's a bit how I feel about this article. After all it is all but common knowledge at this point that the NSA taps all the mails every way they can (and if not directly at the source then at the next hub as raw traffic). Does the same happen in Germany? Maybe. Who knows. But if it does, it's just as bad as the NSA, not worse.

Of course, the result would be different if you discuss the justice system alone and ignore secrect services. But that's a bit like talking about the risks of a fire on the titanic - while it is sinking.

(I wouldn't use a german mail provider btw, but my next choice would not be an US based service neither)

Maybe we need locally hosted email? My home connection is reliable enough. Add an encrypted copy of the data in the cloud as backup.

Last I heard an MX record has to have a static IP address. Is that the case or can you use a dynamic DNS service? I'm close to pulling the trigger on converting one of my old PCs to a server and hosting my own mail would prevent a lot of the Google privacy abuse.

You can use a dynamic DNS for your MX record - however that is only part of the problem. One of the reasons that this would not work on a home connection is that your sent email will be rejected by most email providers. This is because on a dynamic IP address, it would be impossible to correctly set your rDNS address - as well as which many email providers recognise residential IP address ranges and block them by default.

Everybody ignores that law. So no telco actually retain metadata in accordance to the law, they are all waiting to see if any of them is going to get sued for collective civil disobedience, if so they will appeal the law to the human rights court. Also even if they did retain the metadata, it can only be searched with a warrant, where data from non-US citizens in the US can be searched WITHOUT a warrant, not even a secret one is required.

A new account, promoting a virgin company. And a company, run by a German at that, enough reasons for distrust ;-) {The context of this statement being that any Germans would be regarded with distrust in Switzerland, which is the sad truth}

Although I agree, Germany and UK are probably not the best examples of data protection in Europe, try a smaller country like Switzerland, Liechtenstein, or so. Those probably don't have the means to sustain a large surveillance apparatus yet. At least for Switzerland, it's quite known, that the cyber warfare capabilities are abysmal at best - I can't quote readily, but there were newspaper discussions of Switzerland needing to establish such a division in the army.

Yes I specifically signed up to comment on this abysmal article, though I've been lurking on this site for some years. As for the virgin company comment you are far of the mark. Kolab is an opensource software that has been around since 2004; the details can be found here: http://kolabsys.com and http://kolab.org meaning that you can even host it yourself.

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{The context of this statement being that any Germans would be regarded with distrust in Switzerland, which is the sad truth}

A generalization: Swiss people are like coconuts, they seem cold and distant in the beginning but if you are able to crack this shell you will find warm and reliable friendship. This is not specifically against Germans, this is against everything foreign.

As for the "Swiss Secret Service"... well they are estimated to have a staff of around 250 but they manage to srew up every few years anyway. The last was 2010 when they had 200'00 people referenced in their databases (search for "Fichenaffäre" for german speaking readers) and in the aftermath they have to comb through every entry and delete all irrelevant ones.

1. Who you are makes a difference. The USA regards that human rights only apply to US persons (US citizens and US residents).

So a US-based email service operating under US law denies the rest of us any human rights protection.

2. Who are you worried about?

What are the chances that the German police will want to spy on an ordinary law abiding person not in Germany?

Whereas the USA has global ambitions of spying on everyone everywhere.

Not true. The US will spy on you if you happen to have a desire to build bombs and be linked to terrorists. Germany will spy on you if you happen to type "Hitler" in Youtube. They will not even go as far as ban videos, some which are history videos but they will also track and flag German users looking certain websites online, this is not even a secret and you can find references in Wikipedia about Internet censorship, but what most users don´t know if the huge spying systems on ISP and providers in Europe.

The same is true if you look "Scientology" related data and this are just 2 examples.

So how exactly do you think this is better? One is spying over political reasons, they are afraid or right extremism, even just people doing research on the Internet or looking history facts. The second is for religious motives because even if you think Scientology believers are nuts anyone is free to believe what they want.

Your comment is ridiculous because in Germany police will even send people to jail that happen to have a WW2 ring-tone on their cellphone, (look up in Google)

Its funny how Germans always say they are the most democratic and free country and when you confront them with this real facts, they say, ok but its only those specific subjects as they where some kind of excuse.

You see the difference? In the US and even in the rest of most countries, people are free to believe and speak what they want or think if they are not harming anyone. Ideas are free, if they are communist, or nazis, or muslims, or jews, or happen to think the government is evil or believe in aliens. They are all free to do so.

Free yeah as you can go anywhere without a job and money. In U.S. police/sheriff, there are divisions in charge of the surveillance at the city and county sheriff departments. There are the Community Services Divisions, Crime Provision, Red Squad. Police volunteers. Not to mention those from the state bureau departments that conduct surveillance. Divisions under all different type of titles and names in different cities and state that will make your head spin.

I have never been Germany so I take your words for it. I believe what you are saying the German police will lock you up for what you just do search on WWII. But that's good, to me, at lease I know what's coming and so I will prepare for myself. Shut up and put up and not to say anything to offended the government or to the cops. In U.S. the cops will not come to your door and lock you up in jail, instead, they wiretapped your phones and mess with your jobs, your wife's job, your girlfriend's job. Your brother's and sister's jobs. Or they might set you up for child porn. rape. A fight with a homeless person. Now you are a felon. A dangerous criminal record in your back for life. Sex offender? Have a child to file sexual assault on you. You have touch that kid, right?

Arrange a woman sat next to you in a coffee shop and took the picture of you and that woman sitting side by side. The same woman sat next to you in a different coffee shop location. All this going on without you knowing it. A few pictures of you and that same woman sat together. Cops sent those pictures to your wife, girlfriends. What happen next is your wife file for divorce. Everyone of your girlfriend leave you for you are cheating on them. A picture beats a thousand words. Right?

No one knows where those pictures came from. They are from the cops.

As for a human to make a living for doing this to another human just for the money. That's nasty.

You are not a felon. You are a good citizen have never had a run in with the police. You will never guessed all these happening to you were set up by the cops.

This is what I meant U.S. is under the police state. German police sending you to jail is a police state. Many people would accept it and live with it as part of the rulings of the government. This is into the laws. Open to everyone.

In U.S., laws are supposedly protecting you from such cops set up. But the surveillance divisions do it anyway. These divisions are above the laws. And that why all the U.S. politicians and government workers are afraid of such crap will happen to themselves. They kept their mouths shut and let the cops do what they want. The cops keep their power and paychecks as usual. Everybody happy.

Would the German police do the same beside locking you up in jail?

There is this difference. I hope you are aware of it and don't think the U.S. cops are better than the German cops. I think the German cops are better. The way I see it.

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I just pointed some real facts that you cannot possible deny because they happen to be true and German ISPs will not only go as far as ban some of those contents because they think they are wrong for their internet users but even go as far as report them to the police. Yes that is right. If Cyrus Farivar happens to be in Germany as a reporter making a research on ww2, and happens to be looking videos in Youtube or typing on on his laptop in the hotel, all kind of red flags will start in place and censor content but if he insists enough they will even think he is a possible danger to their government and actually send the police to his hotel room.

I don't mind if we have a police state if the cops don't sneak behind you and stab you in your back without you knowing what's happening.

German cops do sounds like China and North Korea, they let you know ahead and you will subject to the consequence if you dare to challenge their authority power. At that point, it will be up to you and me and every one else to make that choice. I have pointed that out in many of my previous posts on other threads, that the U.S. police will do this kind of stuff to you. But the responses comments were: "You made it up. You are too paranoid. You are a troll."

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This is where the US is so different vs Europe which is almost a police state today.

I picked up this few lines from a movie. The Mexican cops said to the U.S. cops at the US/Mexican border. The Mexican cop said: "All the cops are corrupted." As he was pointing at the money in the back seat of the suspect's car. Both sides of the cops want the money. "The only different is, we are opened to it everybody knows. U.S. cops DENIED it."

We are all under the police state as the computer technology are getting more and more advanced and food costs are getting higher and higher. The prices of the living costs are getting higher and higher. Cops want the best for their families. Cars, boats, vacations. What can we say?

I don't worry about wiretaps. NSA reading my emails, I do worry about police set up.

Which police state would you be rather living under? My choice would be the German police.

Interesting to note what information "Do No Evil" Google chooses to collect! I wonder if it stems from their self-imposed Prime Directive to "Index All Information"? Anyway... I don't care, as I'm not a political activist, criminal or vegetarian Gmail is convenient, so I will keep using it. If Google knows where I live, and what kind of porn I search for it hardly matters to me.

I do wonder why people feel that the US constitution (specifically the 4th amendment) should apply to non-US citizens. I wonder if they also feel the 2nd amendment right to keep and bear arms should also apply? Perhaps then we could throw off our US overlords...

I can't myself object to state powers of surveillance quite as much as some do, when I and so many I care for are the beneficiaries of these powers being used. I and everyone I know or who have ever even heard of or suspected of existing have benefitted from law enforcement - who wants criminals? Let's catch them, I say. So if GCHQ feels the need to read my e-mails to be sure I'm not planning on bombing a vegetarian cafe then I'm fine with that. And if one day I completely lose it and actually plan on bombing a vegetarian meet and decide to tell someone about it first by e-mail, then I hope I'm caught before I carry out the dastardly deed. I like vegetarians, and wouldn't want them to be the victim of a (terrible) crime.

OTOH, bacon. Erm, where was I? Ah yes, US-style anti-government paranoia and the need to organise cats anarchists against The Man without Him finding out about it and sending in SWAT teams to, er, tell us we're very naughty or something. Yeah, that's it.

Not true. The US will spy on you if you happen to have a desire to build bombs and be linked to terrorists. Germany will spy on you if you happen to type "Hitler" in Youtube. They will not even go as far as ban videos, some which are history videos but they will also track and flag German users looking certain websites online, this is not even a secret and you can find references in Wikipedia about Internet censorship, but what most users don´t know if the huge spying systems on ISP and providers in Europe.

The same is true if you look "Scientology" related data and this are just 2 examples.

[...]

[...]

I have never been Germany so I take your words for it. I believe what you are saying the German police will lock you up for what you just do search on WWII.

Don't believe a word of his rant – he clearly has no clue about Germany and what actually goes on here. His post is complete and utter rubbish. I can almost see the Scientology / white supremacist web sites he's likely got this nonsense from.

In actual fact, aggressive anti-democratic propaganda is banned beyond a certain point, but you can believe and say pretty much whatever you want (there are of course some limitations regarding libel and slander as in most other countries as well, and of course child pornography and a few other inherently crime-related kinds of content are outright banned and can get you into trouble – also pretty ordinary).

The prohibition of anti-democratic propaganda is of course a reaction to how the last german democracy had been systematically attacked and ultimately destroyed exactly that way (primarily by the nazis, but in previous years communist activists had not been much less destructive as well, eventually providing the excuse to the nazis for abolishing democracy altogether).

So you will have a problem getting a permit for an openly racist and anti-democratic public rally. But no police officer will bother you or even take an interest when you're merely discussing stuff with another person outside of a public presentation or when you're just browsing the web or Youtube. Even in a public setting there's quite a bit of latitude in practice – nazi groups keep trying to hold rallies in german cities, but they usually meet civic resistance holding counter-rallies in far larger numbers than their own.

Scientology is a separate, but related case. Similar to the nazis, Scientology has explicitly stated that it sees the democratic order as its enemy and that its members are supposed to infiltrate and destroy it from within. This does in fact not go over very well with most of german society (where Scientology is mostly shunned and sidelined) but they are also under state surveillance due to their activities (their at least semi-criminal member exploitation system further adds to the issue, and not in a good way). But of course from within, it's all just the evil, evil democratic state and, of course, the fundamentally evil conspiracy of psychologists. (Where's the cuckoo icon when you need one?)

Given the currently running attack from within on the US government by the "tea party", maybe it should be worth a thought to demand some semblance of objectivity from licensed media as well and to not to let any billionaire with a self-interested cause run wild ramming dumbed-down propaganda lies down people's throats with zero accountability and without anybody stopping them.

I do wonder why people feel that the US constitution (specifically the 4th amendment) should apply to non-US citizens. I wonder if they also feel the 2nd amendment right to keep and bear arms should also apply? Perhaps then we could throw off our US overlords...

In the german constitution there are fundamental and universal human rights which apply to everybody, beyond the scope of national laws. The US constitution in principle has similar concepts, but american legislative practice has come to summarily ignore any non-american people's rights.

I can't myself object to state powers of surveillance quite as much as some do, when I and so many I care for are the beneficiaries of these powers being used. I and everyone I know or who have ever even heard of or suspected of existing have benefitted from law enforcement - who wants criminals? Let's catch them, I say. So if GCHQ feels the need to read my e-mails to be sure I'm not planning on bombing a vegetarian cafe then I'm fine with that. And if one day I completely lose it and actually plan on bombing a vegetarian meet and decide to tell someone about it first by e-mail, then I hope I'm caught before I carry out the dastardly deed. I like vegetarians, and wouldn't want them to be the victim of a (terrible) crime.

This is where the political and philosophical issue of privacy comes in.

It is pure, self-serving fiction that total surveillance could provide total security. It can't; And beyond a certain point this ends in a police state where everybody is proactively editing everything they say, write and discuss for fear of the all-seeing authorities. And there will still be crime and terrorism – maybe even more.

I think dynamic DNS would be okay, but you can’t run a server because major ISPs block port 25. E.g., Comcast. To get around this, you have to find an ISP that doesn’t block it (and some of those still have a policy against running servers on your home network); or pay more for business-grade Internet service, in which case you’ll have a static IP anyway.

.. or use the submission port 587 that's not blocked by pretty much any ISP, at least where I live.

Germany won’t save you: Why e-mail is probably safer in the US, for US citizens

Article ignore facts that:1) if you are not US citizen, you have almost NONE privacy rights in US2) some EU countries (Switzerland,...) have more protection than Germany3) in EU you need court order for data, while in US lot of data is obtained without high standard court order

If you're serious about all that, get a business-grade connection with a fixed IP address from your provider and run your own email server at home. It's not that hard to do and while it isn't going to make your email more secure it surely will get you more privacy especially for communications with others using the very same server. Do the same for contacts and calendar syncing and you'll be free from most of the mass surveillance that is happening as a matter of course now.

That is, until they raid your home and seize all your computers indefinitely. Which they don't have to try very hard in order to do, even legally.

Yes, as I said: This is not going to make your email more secure. But as long as they're not going to raid all homes once a week you're out of the ongoing mass surveillance.

I would even say it would make your email LESS secure since running an Internet-facing host in your home requires some serious hardening and you'll probably be worse at that than the engineers at Google. But privacy-wise this is a clear win. Use self-signed certificates and your own keys for everything and/or a VPN to connect to the server from all your devices, give your friends and family an account there and they will not be able to even see the metadata.